April 05, 2008

Precious

"Blasting the Iraqi political leadership for not doing its part, Clinton said: 'We have given them the precious gift of freedom. We cannot win their civil war.'"  Hillary Clinton on the stump, quoted recently in the LA Times.

And no doubt those ungrateful Iraqis can't win our War On (some) Terrorism, either, despite having been invaded and then ruled with deep incompetence by a foreign government itself ruled by incompetents.

(Not especially trying to pick on Clinton here, but it seems hard to go beyond this quote for a succinct expression of the clueless arrogance and belligerent self-pity on Iraq affecting even (or, perhaps, especially) the Democratic front-runners. The strategy evolving here is obvious: blame the Iraqis for victimizing a blameless US by not rising to the occasion, and pull out in a self-righteous huff. It's a deeply hypocritical and destructive strategy, but it's likely to work wonderfully for those who espouse it, at least for the next year or so. There's been a lot of pointed talk lately here about the cost of the war, but it's the Iraqis who've paid the highest price by far, and endless talk about forcing the Iraqis to shoulder their fair share of the cost only shows that it's much easier to monetize the US costs than the Iraqi losses).